Susan Taubes, introduction by David Rieff: “Divorcing”

David Rieff discusses “Divorcing” by Susan Taubes, an autobiographical novel with phantasmagoric components: the reimagined end of a marriage. Now republished by New York Review Books, it was first released just weeks before its author’s early death in 1969. Unlike other experimental novels from the time period, this one is built to last, and it goes all over the place, with a lot of different threads, and a partly dreamlike narrative. A painful novel about the intimately awful horror of daily life, anyone who reads it will feel torn apart.

Excerpt from “Divorcing” by Susan Taubes.

While traveling, Sophie Blind carried her accumulation of some thirty-five years in boxes, suitcases, trunks, barrels, crates and the like. Not on her person, or necessarily accompanying her person. On her person she carried only what was necessary depending on the nature of the journey—whether by boat, plane, train, bus or foot—its length and destination and, finally, the number of persons traveling.

This seemed the obvious way to deal with things: pack and unpack and pack again if you were traveling, and Sophie had been traveling all her life. When she married she continued traveling with her hus- band. Ezra Blind was working on a book that might take all his life to complete, or at least the next twenty years; his work required going to libraries and meeting scholars of different countries. Fortunately Ezra managed to get invited as a visiting lecturer to good universities on both sides of the Atlantic as far as Jerusalem. So they lived in many different cities, sometimes for only a few months, sometimes for as long as two years, and traveled to other places in between. Sophie liked traveling. She also liked to have some things she cherished, a few familiar objects around her, wherever she was, beyond the more or less same sky with its same sun and moon and more or less same walls. Some things she found, some she stole, some she bought. Sophie liked traveling. For a wedding present from her father-in-law Sophie asked for an extension of their honeymoon trip instead of a fur coat. Not want a fur coat? Their daughter-in-law must have a fur coat. When at the birth of a son a fur coat was bought, it was for their respective family pictures. She wore the coat for them. She was their daughter-in-law. But did she have to take it along with her everywhere while traveling with her husband? Yes, because Ezra paid part. His father had said, “I want to buy Sophie a five-hundred-dollar fur coat.” Ezra said, “Buy her one for seven hundred dollars. I know a man through whom we can get a nine-hundred-dollar coat for seven hundred dollars. I pay the two hundred and we save four hundred and she will have the best coat.” With Ezra Sophie wore the fur coat and jewelry he bought for her. Whenever Ezra felt desperate about their future, he bought Sophie a piece of heavy silver jewelry.

Excerpted from Divorcing © 1969 Susan Taubes. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.